


Commence!

by woodironbone



Category: Russian Doll (TV 2019)
Genre: Aftermath, Canon-typical language, Gen, Gift Fic, Present Tense, Yuletide 2019, chain smoking, or two nerds detangling the metaphysical implications of it, this is either platonic or ship fic whatever your heart desires is what's there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodironbone/pseuds/woodironbone
Summary: What's next?
Comments: 65
Kudos: 155
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Commence!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neutrophilic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neutrophilic/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! This is my attempt to explore one possible interpretation of the season's end, which was a really fun challenge since I'm very wedded to the ambiguity of it all. I absolutely adore this show and it was such a joy to write for it. I hope you enjoy and have a wonderful holiday!

Monday.

Nadia wakes up with the word stuck in her head like a piece of a dream lodged in her throat or some other mixed fuckin’ simile, and her hand lashes out, grabbing for where sense memory tells her to look for her phone. Instead she clocks Alan in the face.

“Ow! Fuck!” He startles awake, his hands flying up to shield his nose while he squints at her reproachfully. “Jeez!” he adds for good muffled measure.

“Alan!” She sits up, wide-eyed-awake, grinning as she takes in his big ridiculous frame sprawled across her bed, lingering for a few extra seconds on the scarf that absolutely does not look like something he’d own in any timeline. “Holy shit, man, did we do it?”

“Nadia?” He looks at her as if seeing her for the first time, still squinting but with that sort of calculator brain energy he has. “You—you remember me?”

“ _Course_ , man!” She’s still grinning. There’s gaps, there’s always gaps. Logistical questions washing up like flotsam and jetsam on the shore of all right enough with the fuckin’ similes. “I can’t believe you remembered my college fund, holy _shit_ , man, that’s like some freakin’ Beautiful Mind level shit. Like a steel trap, huh? Fuck.” This last aside directed to her phone, which she now finds in her pocket, chirping at her. _11:30 –_ _MTG:_ _Code Review_. “Aw, Christ. Fuckin’ Monday.”

“Th-there’s nothing _‘Beautiful Mind_ ’ about just being good with numbers,” says Alan, lightly disgruntled. He sits up slowly, a staunch contrast to Nadia’s buzzing energy as she rolls outta bed and starts flitting around her apartment, getting her shit together to go outside. “Wait.”

“Not today, man, not to-day.” She pulls off the top Maxine loaned her and pulls on the red one. Monday shirt. “Lots to do, lots to fix. Lots of questions. _Shit_. Fuck. Does Ruth still have a gas leak? I don’t know if that was like the universe glitching out or not. _Fuuuuck_.”

She grabs her phone again and punches Ruth’s line on the top of her contacts, holding the phone up to her ear. Alan’s still in bed looking like a little lost baby. “ _Alan_ , get up, man, this is serious.”

“That’s—but—” He flinches as she chucks one of his shoes at him; it lands safely on the bed beside him, which is where she aimed it, and he hesitates with a little frown before he starts putting it on, lacing up one and then the other. “Nadia, how did you know I—”

“Ruth! Ruthie! Oh my god, you picked up. She picked up!” she tells Alan excitedly before her attention is latched back to the questions coming in her ear, she can’t even pick out the words over her own relief. “Ruth, listen to me, _don’t_ turn the stove on, okay? You have a gas leak. I—yes, a _gas leak_. Just—I just _know_ , okay? Just trust me, please. I’m coming right over. I’m bringing someone, okay? Ruth, listen: _don’t make any tea_. This is very important. I’ve never told you anything so fuckin’ important in my life. Okay. Okay. I love you. Bye.” She hangs up and slips her phone back in her pocket with a big sigh. “Christ, okay. She’s okay. What are you still doin’ in bed, Alan, get dressed, we got a lot to do today.”

“ _Nadia—_!” Finally, she stops, lifting her hands in a big exaggerated shrug, all _What, what do you want?_ He’s still sitting down, staring at her. Closer to eye level now than when he’s standing. “ _How_ is this possible, how…. How do you know about the gas leak _and_ that I remembered your college fund? Are you the Nadia I met in the elevator or the one I met last night?”

“…Huh.” Nadia’s gaze wanders to the middle distance and she nods slowly. “That is a pertinent fucking question.” It’s a little weird, actually, the things she remembers. She remembers the first loop like it was yesterday in a more-than-metaphysical sense; and she remembers it _different_ , getting the phone call and Farran rattling off the number she knows in her bones and has never shared with anyone. And she remembers _last_ night, finding the Alan that wasn’t her Alan but he _was_ , too, and taking him home and staying with him and being so fuckin’ afraid he’d jumped. And telling him, _promising_ him he would not be alone.

This is not that Alan. That’s an unimpeachable fact, that’s obvious now. But she’s willing to bet he remembers too much shit just the same as she does, too much at once, a big old rubberband ball of memories that don’t fit together. Or he would, without the massive intoxication roadblock.

“You hungover?” she asks.

“What?” He frowns like he’s thinking about it. “I don’t think so.”

“Well. We got that goin’ for us.” She pulls on her coat and crosses the room to him, trying to haul him up off her bed. He comes along a bit reluctantly, which feels like it just adds unnecessary work for her, but at least he’s cooperating. “Look, for once we got plenty of time to figure this shit out. But _later_. When I know Ruth’s okay. You should start makin’ a list, right? What actually went down last night, who do we need to check on. Are there any other gas leaks or what have you. That kinda thing. Please don’t think of any more gas leaks, though, cause I don’t think my heart can take it.”

“Okay,” says Alan like it isn’t okay at all, tugging on his jacket as she hustles him out the door. They’re halfway up the block when he finally says, “Wait, that doesn’t—how do we even know what happened last night? Whose version is real? I mean, did you—did you even find me?”

“I know you know I did, or we wouldn’t be standing here,” she says. She thinks. It was all a lot of theory. “Look, there’s lots to sort out, okay? One thing at a time. Let’s get some bullet points going. You’re a bullet points kinda guy, aren’t you? I bet putting things on a list makes you just insatiably happy.”

Alan hesitates and she can feel the urge to deny it radiating off him before he mumbles, “Yeah.”

“And there’s nothing wrong with that,” Nadia promises him. “Trust me, makes you a big asset to those of us with, uhh, divergent skillsets. So, bullet one: fix Ruth’s gas leak. I’m gonna pick up _Emily of New Moon_ and I’m gonna give it to Lucy, so I guess we gotta head to that café next, then I’m gonna have to have _that_ whole conversation with _John_ so _that’s_ gonna be like an hour minimum—”

“Is this all still bullet one?”

Nadia waves her hand dismissively into his orbit before dropping it back down to grope around in her pockets for her cigarettes. “Look, you’re in charge of bullets, okay, I’m just spitballing here. So that’s Ruth, Lucy, John, I should probably check in on Max and Lizzy at some point, and I don’t know if you still need to talk to Beatrice or if you even _want_ me there for tha— _Horse_.”

She can, somehow, _feel_ Alan’s stare landing solidly on the top of her head. “ _Horse_?”

Nadia sighs heavily, perching a cigarette between her lips as she yanks her lighter up on its drawstring. Task complete, so many still to go, she lets the lighter reel itself back and pulls her coat closer around herself as she picks up the pace. “There was so much goin’ on last night, I—I didn’t save his shoes.”

“His… _shoes_? Like an actual horse with horseshoes?”

“Nah, nah, nah, Horse. He’s a, y’know, a homeless guy. Someone at the shelter always steals his shoes on Sunday, so one time I went and kept watch. You know, that’s actually why we met in that elevator.” She glances up and smirks at his big confused face. “You proposed to him last night, by the way, so. Congrats.”

“I _propos_ —” _There_ it is. He stops short, and Nadia has to loop her arm into his to keep tugging him along with her while he digs around in his pocket. “Nadia, I—my stuff is gone,” he blurts. “My wallet, my phone, my—the _ring_ , Beatrice’s ring. Did I—did that really—”

“Well, it’s not Beatrice’s anymore, it’s Horse’s. _Also_ , Beatrice never actually took it, so, y’know, _ipso facto_ it was never hers to begin with. Eh?” Nadia pats his arm, she thinks reassuringly, trying to inch him back from the imminent meltdown. “Don’t worry buddy, we’ll work it out. Kind of a fun trick the universe played on you there, like, you don’t have a hangover _but_ you still gave away all your stuff, like what is that, is that supposed to be like an even trade? Maybe the universe doesn’t have morality but I’m developing a theory that it does have a very dark sense of humor.”

Alan’s not really listening. He shakes his head, not like he doesn’t agree, more like he’s trying to knock something loose. “How’m I gonna get the train?”

“Well, I _would_ just abandon you on the sidewalk, don’t get me wrong,” says Nadia, pulling him closer and leaning on his arm a bit. “But I think after all we’ve been through I can probably spring for a cab.”

Alan tries, endearingly unsuccessful, not to fidget. He’s sitting at Ruth’s dinner table, his stare cutting a direct line to the bowl of pristinely ripe apples on the table in the kitchen, while Nadia goes through the box of her things. She pulls out the big Matryoshka doll tucked in there and sets it in front of him on a hunch. His attention flicks over for a few seconds, and then he begins playing with it, lifting each doll out and creating a careful, precise line of them on the table. Easy. Alan enrichment. Nadia ducks her chin down to hide a smirk.

“Okay, muffin,” Ruth calls as she swans back in from the other room. “I made the call, they said they’ll send someone right over to check it out. I’m _sure_ it’s fine, but—”

“ _Thank_ you,” says Nadia as she fishes the book out of the box. “You know I wouldn’t insist if it wasn’t important.”

“Well.” Ruth comes close and touches under her chin, sweeps a thumb over her cheek. “I don’t know where you got this idea, but if it’s important to you, it’s important to me. Are you gonna introduce me to this handsome young man now?”

“I—I’m Alan,” he says, looking up from the line of nesting dolls and maybe possibly blushing a little bit. “It’s… nice to see you again.”

“Oh, darling, forgive me, my memory isn’t what it used to be,” says Ruth with a dramatic flourishing gesture. “Have we met before?”

“Kinda,” says Nadia. “Listen, don’t worry about it, Ruthie. I’m so sorry we can’t stay, but I gotta split. Lots of people to check on today. Just _don’t use the stove_ , okay?”

“I promise,” says Ruth, hand raised. Nadia pulls away to slip back into her coat, and she hears Ruth say to Alan, “Have you two known each other long?”

“Kind of,” he says.

“Does she seem different to you?” Nadia glances back to see Ruth smiling at her, a little bit of curiosity lit up in her eyes. “There’s something a little different, I can’t put my finger on it.”

“I think so,” says Alan, and he smiles at Nadia, too.

“Hm.” Ruth chuckles and turns away, like she’s averting her eyes from something that isn’t her business. Sort of missing the mark a bit, but it’s cute, Nadia supposes. “Guess a lot must have happened last night.”

“Kinda,” Nadia and Alan both say at once. Nadia grins and pops another cigarette in her mouth. “We’ll see you later, Ruthie.”

Nadia steers Alan around the café’s service entrance doors—they’re closed but she sure as shit don’t trust ‘em—as they make a brisk escape from the café and the unruly social crater she’s just left inside it.

“Okay, that was… _so_ awkward,” says Alan. “I don’t think I should’ve been there for it.”

“Nnneh.” Nadia lights up again. He’s probably right. Meeting Lucy without forewarning wasn’t really near the top of her best laid plans, and dragging Alan along probably made it about three times as weird with John. But she gave Lucy the book, and she told John she was sorry, and he seemed like he believed it, even if there was a lot of exasperation and confusion overriding everything else. She’ll count it as a victory. “Forgive me for not wanting to split up the gang,” she says. “And I dunno if I can be blamed for not remembering which things I said to him when.”

“None of it,” says Alan. “You didn’t tell him anything. For him, none of this has happened.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I _know_ , just—like which parts worked better than others. It’s not like I kept a script.” Nadia shrugs. “I can try again, y’know, even without the reset button. John and I… that’s just how it goes, sometimes. And Lucy has every right to be mad at me, right?”

Alan’s quiet for a few paces. “It’s kinda nice to hear you say that,” he admits.

“Yeah, well. Maybe Ruth’s onto something.” She takes a long drag, looking up at the cold sunny sky as she lets the smoke out into the world. “What are we doing next? You wanna see Beatrice?”

“I…” Alan stops, pulling her to a gentle halt beside him. “Before we do anything else I wanna know what’s going on. I don’t get how this is _possible_ , how we both… we both remember two entirely different realities. The people we are now don’t match up. We experienced _different things_ last night, so how do we know…. Which ones really happened, like… who _are_ we?”

“Okay, okay.” Nadia turns to face him, tucking her sunglasses down her nose to better meet his eyes. “I don’t know, all right? I mean, for _once_ , this is uncharted territory, like yes, it’s still Monday and we did Monday a bunch, but now it’s all…” She waves her hand around, stalling while her vocabulary fails to keep up. “It’s all tangled together. But we _know_ we fixed the bug and we did the reset. We know this because how? Because we met the unformed versions of ourselves last night. _That_ was the proof things were fixed. We needed that variable or there woulda been no way to know anything was different, until we died I guess.”

“I thought it was because everything else was back,” says Alan dubiously. “The mirrors, the ring, my fish—”

“—and Oatmeal. _Yes_.” Nadia nods busily, taking another heavy drag on her cigarette before gesturing animatedly with it, leaving a swirl of smoke in the air that makes Alan recoil minutely. “And, you know, all the people. But that was too easy, right? We faced our demons or whatever, but we still didn’t fix the original glitch, that we were supposed to help each other. So my guess is that it was like a second-level unit test. If we could figure out how to save each other that first night, improvising from scratch, then we’d get out for good. And now we just have like… ephemeral leftovers in our memory. All of that _happened_ , but it didn’t happen, you know?”

“No,” says Alan bluntly. “That literally doesn’t make any sense. Does that make sense to you?”

“Well, gimme a break, okay, it’s a working theory.” Nadia sticks the cigarette back in her mouth and grabs his arm, trying to guide him onward again. “The universe is chaotic, okay? But it also runs on set rules. We may not understand all of them, but it fits together somehow. Organized chaos. So I guess what I’m saying is… it just worked itself out somehow, because it _had_ to.”

“But that’s—” Alan stammers irritably for a moment before settling on, “— _so_ unsatisfying.”

“Take it up with the Schrödinger, okay buddy? Look, if we really want to work out the little details we need _constants_. We both represent the variables in this particular equation, so we gotta know the framework we’re lookin’ at. And that means chasing down more people. Does Max remember me leaving with the gingerbread guy or does she remember throwing her drink in my face? Does Beatrice remember ruining your night, or did you even swing by at all? _Did_ you swing by?”

“I texted her a picture of you and Mike,” he says.

“Oh.” Nadia blinks. “Well. Fuckin’ obliterated.”

“I’m gonna talk to her, just…” He shakes his head. Something’s still bothering him, but Nadia kinda likes watching him wrestle it out. Far cry from where he used to be. _Lives are hard to change_ , huh. “If we find out that _one_ of our experiences is truer than the other, does that mean one of us doesn’t belong here? Whichever thing Max remembers, I mean—”

Nadia grimaces and starts fishing out her phone. “Okay, all right, I’ll call her. Jesus.” She hates the idea, now that he’s presented it. That one of them is some kinda stowaway in this universe. She hates it because it has massive implications, obviously, like that maybe the universe isn’t done with them after all; but more than that she hates that it produces some kind of unspoken competition between them. Maybe Alan doesn’t see it that way; maybe she doesn’t, either. But she’s not too thrilled by the possibility that one of them has more business being here than the other.

But it’s a question that needs answering, so she calls Max, who picks up with a cheerful, “Heyyy baby.”

“Hiya Max,” says Nadia. Alan’s watching her way too attentively, and she can’t bring herself to turn away. “Listen, I’m sorry I dipped out so early last night, huh? It was a great party, and you’re a terrific host.”

“ _Aww!_ ” She can hear Max smiling and she cracks a faint grin over it, tinged with nervous tension over what comes next. “Is it okay if I _don’t_ accept your apology, though, because then I’d feel like I have to apologize for throwing a drink in your face and I think that was a really good look for me.”

Nadia’s eyes dart up to Alan’s, though she keeps her expression as neutral as she knows how. She’s not sure if she’s relieved or what. It kinda feels bad no matter what.

Maxine’s still talking, but not to her. “What—? Okay, okay, uh… Lizzy wants me to tell you something.” Nadia glances back down and tunes back in as Max goes on, “She, uh, wants me to say thank you for saying that about the mastiff puppies. I don’t know what she’s talking about. … Apparently you told your buddy Alan to tell her that. Who’s _Alan_?”

Nadia goes very still, staring at nothing, then, slowly, at Alan. “Can you put Lizzy on?”

“She just went to take a shower. There was a whole elaborate pile of bodies. You missed out.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” She hangs up before Max is done saying goodbye, her stare still locked on Alan, who’s beginning to wilt a bit under it. “Did you go to my party last night?”

“Y-yeah,” says Alan. “I was looking for you.”

“And you talked to Lizzy?”

“…Yeah.” Alan looks down, fumbling with his little scarf. “Her girlfriend gave me this.” His eyes find hers again. He looks guilty, like this isn’t the answer he wanted. “So… so that means—”

“Setting aside that you apparently apologized on my behalf for something I should probably have apologized for myself,” Nadia cuts him off, “Lizzy remembers your timeline. _Max_ remembers _mine_.”

Alan blinks rapidly, his nose wrinkling a bit. “Wait, _what_?”

“Uh-huh.” Nadia flicks the stub of her cigarette away and stuffs her hands in her pockets, casting about directionlessly. “I’m guessing we overlapped each other a bit. Like either way, I left the party before you got there. So does that mean this shit was happening _concurrently_ , or—shit, did anyone even see us at the same—”

“Farran,” Alan blurts out.

She looks at him sharply, her eyes big behind her shades. “Holy fuck. Farran.”

Nadia has been inside this deli just about every day since she moved into this neighborhood. It’s one of the most comforting places she knows, even as just a quick stop. She’s never felt the kind of nauseating dread she feels as she steps inside it now.

They were both quiet on their quick walk over, and she figures it was with a lot of the same internal turmoil. Farran’s abruptly become the hinge on which this all swings. Which of their versions of events he remembers, or much, much worse in Nadia’s mind—if he, too, somehow remembers _both_ , and they dragged him into this fucked up labyrinth of overlapping timelines. What would that even _do_ to him, is he just gonna be a confused wreck or actively existing in some kind of dual-reality superposition nightmare state? Is this shit _contagious_?

If it’s any of that, he’s taking it extremely well, leaning on the counter, eyes locked on his tablet as he puzzles over his novel. Oatmeal’s there too, curled up at his elbow, sleeping soundly. Nadia remembers bringing him in last night; she also remembers wandering the park with Alan, and she’s not sure if they found him or not. Which is weird, but she doesn’t have time to think about it before Farran looks up, blinking as he takes the two of them in and then straightening up with a smile.

“About _time_ you two showed,” he says. With a little nod to Alan he says, “What’s up, man, I’ve been trying to call you all morning.”

“Farran,” says Nadia, peering at him a little too closely. He’s already reaching up to the back wall to get her smokes. “You good, man?”

“Can’t complain.” He turns around, sliding the pack over to her. “So is someone finally gonna tell me what happened last night?”

Nadia opens her mouth and shuts it again, finding herself rather uncharacteristically without anything to say. She glances up at Alan and finds him looking back, equally (less uncharacteristically) speechless.

“Seriously?” she says at length.

Farran balks a bit, giving them a sheepish shrug. “I mean, I know it’s none of my business, but I—it’s just crazy to me you two know each other, like, how did I not know that? _”_

“Yeah,” she says slowly. “It’s definitely wild. Uh, look, can you just humor us for a second and tell _us_ what you think happened last night?”

Farran hesitates much longer this time, and his eyes slide over to Alan, who answers with a short nod and a helpfully steady, “Please.”

“Um…” Farran laughs uncomfortably and says, “I mean, I guess I kind of assumed you two were—”

“Nah, nah, nah.” Nadia waves all that off. “I mean _literally_ , beat for beat, what happened last night? Which of us was here, who said what? Was there a guy with me? Was Alan really drunk and sad? When did Oatmeal get here?”

“What are you—” Farran shakes his head, kind of like how Alan does it. “ _You_ brought Oatmeal here, and then you left, and then Alan showed up. I don’t _think_ you were drunk?” He looks at Alan, who does a sheepish shrug of his own. Less helpful.

“I _brought Oatmeal_ and then I _left_?” Nadia leans forward, resting her elbows on the counter. “This is very important. Was there someone _with_ me? This smug kinda Michael Keaton lookin’ guy, but if he was an off-off-Broadway critic instead of, y’know, Birdman?”

Alan snorts.

“Whhhat,” is all Farran manages to get out before he gives up on it. “ _No_ , Nadia, it was just you.”

“And then I left,” says Nadia. “This is important. I _left_? Before Alan got here?”

“ _Yes_ ,” he says. “Jesus. You just missed each other. Alan got here and then he asked me about you and I was surprised you knew each other and then he asked for your number, which I thought was really weird because he knew about Oatmeal but not your number? And he wrote down this big amount of money and told me to call you and tell you you owed him that, so I _did_ , and you said you were coming, and then _he_ left to go outside and meet you.”

“That—” Alan starts and stops again, and Nadia turns around to look at him, pretty plainly stunned. “That’s not—how is that _possible_?”

“Are you guys _okay_?” Farran seems genuinely concerned now, which is pretty sweet, actually. “Like I thought it was all kinda shady but I didn’t think it was—look, I just thought you were fooling around behind Beatrice’s back, okay? Did something _happen_ , like something genuinely fucked up?”

“I think so,” says Nadia, but she’s smiling now. “But you know what, I think it’s gonna be okay. The universe, it, uhhh, has a way of working shit out.”

“What… does that mean?” says Farran.

“Beatrice and I are breaking up,” says Alan. He’s still looking at Nadia, but now with the face of surrender. Atta boy.

“Holy shit, _what?_ ”

Nadia fishes some cash out of her pocket and drops it on the counter, swiping the cigarettes and throwing Farran a wink. “Congratulations are in order,” she says with a wink. “He got free.”

Farran just stares at them both as she walks back, grabbing Alan by the arm to haul him back out. Alan goes with her, leaving Farran with a feeble, “I’ll—I’ll explain later.”

“Okay…?” says Farran as the door swings shut.

“Okay but _how_ is that possible,” says Alan once they’re on the street. “None of that is how it happened, he remembers like, _pieces_ of both and he just twisted it together into this completely fake _thing_.”

“You know there were a few Enlightenment era philosophers who thought reality only existed because someone was there to perceive it,” says Nadia. “Like the moment you stop existing, it stops existing with you. Granted, it always kinda fell apart when they remembered they lived in a fundamentally Christian society where you couldn’t get away with just being existential for the hell of it, and coming up with some reason that God was behind all this kinda took all the fun out of it, y’know? I mean what do they know, they were just a bunch of old white guys. _But_ the idea was still there, that the human brain and sensory capacity is the only reason any of this is real. And when you start to think about how everyone experiences everything _differently_ , it kinda says a lot about the multiverse, doesn’t it? Like if everyone’s perceiving their own shit on their own terms, does that mean all of it is true at once, that the only thing keeping it from getting all tangled together like this is we usually don’t actually _see_ the overlap?”

“You mean like…” Alan frowns slowly, and she can all but hear the little gears grinding away. “So Max and Lizzy can remember things that happened in different timelines because… because _we’re_ both here, and that means both of those timelines real?”

She nods emphatically and lights up another cigarette. She feels excited, maybe too excited, but fuck that, it’s exciting. “We had it backwards. The timeline isn’t what justifies _us_. We’re what defines the timeline. So two contradictory accounts happen to match up because they can’t confirm or deny each other’s versions of it. Lizzy didn’t see me leave and Max didn’t see you there. But even if they _did_ contradict, it wouldn’t matter, because they’re both true at once. _Farran_ experienced _both_ timelines, but he still put them together. The brain is really good at that shit, making connections that don’t exist, honestly that’s the only reason we can perceive _anything_. So for him it just works, because it has to. _We’re_ the only ones who saw every piece of it, can spot all the shit that doesn’t work, because we have more context. It’s like we dipped into the back end of a video game where all the physics does whatever it wants.”

“Holy shit,” says Alan, and she’s delighted to see a slow grin spreading across his face. “That’s kind of awesome.”

“It _is_ awesome,” she says. “And that just leaves one problem.”

“It… it does?”

She nods, making a beeline for the park. “Reality is prioritizing all the stuff that happened to the versions of us that remember everything. _That’s_ the shit that stuck: me finding Oatmeal, you not having a hangover. So _why_ ,” she taps his arm sharply and looks up to catch his eyes, “does Horse have all your shit?”

Alan does an extremely good impression of the gif of the lady surrounded by mathematical formulae. Nadia grins in spite of herself. “ _Exactly_ ,” she says.

It doesn’t take Nadia long to realize that apart from that one brief bit of morning in the shelter, she’s never actually seen Horse in daylight. They ramble aimlessly around the park for almost thirty minutes before she calls time, and they head over to see Beatrice, instead. She’s upset, _really_ upset—she’d been worrying about how Alan hadn’t showed up as expected, only for him to text her an hour later with evidence that the man she was sleeping with was cheating on her, and look, he just brought over the woman he was cheating with. Nadia ends up waiting in the hall.

The conversation quiets down when she’s left the room, and her attempts to listen at the door don’t deliver much in the way of results. She’s left alone to mull over the fact that while there’s been some kind of internal consistency to all of this—that nobody but Farran saw them overlap, and Farran conveniently reorganized his memory to undo that, Beatrice has photographic evidence that she—her past, unformed self—did exist that night. Pretty fuckin’ heavy. Nadia wonders what would happen if they tracked down Mike-from-the-party and asked if he remembers trying to consensually screw this young lady in peace. Instead she lights up a fifth cigarette. She thinks she can live without having that particular detail answered.

When Alan finally emerges, he looks tired but relieved, and he just gives her a little nod. Too much to say aloud. Nadia smiles and gives his shoulder a little squeeze.

This leaves them the day, which is a weird place to be. It passes slowly, slower than it’s ever passed, from Alan’s apartment to a shoe store to a diner, and the gaping future stretches out before them like a very long shadow, the reality of it starting to really settle in. By the time the sun’s down and they’re shivering their way toward the park, the mood has shifted from the day’s manic elation to a quieter anxiety as the untouched horizon approaches.

But Horse isn’t difficult to find. He’s always there, sooner or later.

“Hey, man!” Nadia trots over to him and holds up the pair of boots she’d bought earlier, as similar as she could find to the ones he lost. “I was wondering if I could make a trade.”

Horse remains slouched against the gate, staring at her with one birdlike eye. “For what?”

“I’m assuming you remember your brand new fiancé.” She nods at Alan. “If you could return his phone I’d be very grateful. You can keep the rest.”

“Wait—” Alan starts, and Nadia shushes him.

Horse looks at Alan for a long time, and the man is fuckin’ inscrutable. Nadia truly can’t tell if he remembers Alan or not, or _how_ he remembers him.

“Come with me,” says Horse at great length. Nadia gives him the shoes and follows him, looking back to make sure Alan’s coming along. He trails behind a bit, and she extends a hand until he finally takes it.

Horse leads them to his little dwelling. None of his friends are there; just him and his stuff. He climbs onto the table where he cut Nadia’s hair and starts digging through his things until he recovers Alan’s phone. “Died in the night,” he says as he hands it gingerly over. “You got like eighty messages.”

“Thanks,” says Alan a bit stiffly as he pockets it.

“Hey thanks, man, I appreciate it,” says Nadia. “You gonna be okay tonight, you got a place to keep warm? It’s gonna get real cold. Those shitty blankets aren’t gonna cut it.”

“I’m okay,” says Horse, blinking at her. He studies her for a while before sitting down to pull on the boots. “I wanna cut your hair.”

“Yeah,” says Nadia with a soft smile. “But I think I need it right now. Maybe later.” She considers him a moment longer before she says, “So just to be clear, you remember him proposing to you last night, right?”

“Sure.” Horse glances at Alan, gives him a toothy smile. “Does he remember me?”

“Oh, he remembers lots of things. Great memory, this one. You’re lucky to have him.” Nadia leans forward on the table. “Do you also remember giving me my cat?”

Horse leans back like he needs to see her in greater perspective before he answers, “I didn’t. He chose you.”

“Right.” Nadia looks at Alan, who shrugs haplessly. “What else do you remember?”

“What else do _you_ remember?” Horse sprawls back on his pile of belongings, and for whatever reason Nadia’s eyes drift to the corner, where there’s a mildly creepy papier-mâché deer head just sitting on the ground, staring at them.

She straightens up slowly, her gaze fixed on the thing as something else shifts in her memory, something that isn’t clear at all. “Was there a parade?” she says eventually, and looks at Alan. “Do you remember a parade?”

Alan’s expression goes slack, and then tightens back up as he goes through the same process, pulling the memory up by the root, trying to fit it into something. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I—I kinda thought I dreamed that part.”

“Me too.” Nadia looks at Horse, who’s still smiling.

“You know this kinda place isn’t really here,” he says with a vague gesture to encompass the little enclosure. “Nobody ever sees it. It’s just a place in between the place you’re coming from and the place you’re going. Same as under the bridge.” He points out toward the park, toward the world. The bridge where it happened, where they walked into the tide of that wonderland shit. “Liminal.”

“Yeah,” says Nadia. She knows the word, and she nods. “Yeah.”

“When we—we joined that parade, there were—that’s the only thing that happened both times.” Alan’s eyes are fixed on the deer head too; he’s almost twitching with how much he’s whirring away. “It was like a transition, we went in, like both our selves went in and we came out whole.”

“Eh.” Nadia shrugs and turns back to Horse. “A little _neat_ for my tastes, but I can go with it.”

“Are you kids on drugs?” says Horse.

“Hey, man, stay warm tonight, okay? I’m serious.” Nadia pulls away, feeling the itch to keep moving, keep walking, not to sit in a transitory space, not to wait a minute longer. She takes Alan by the arm once again, but she doesn’t quite leave, not without the assurance that Horse is gonna make it.

“I’ll find someplace,” says Horse with a conviction she’s inclined to believe. He does have some funds, after all, courtesy of the sad drunk Alan who apparently did exist, just like she exists in that picture on Beatrice’s phone.

“You.” Horse points at Nadia. “You let me cut your hair sometime.”

“You got it, man.” It’s a pact. She gives him a wave and pulls Alan back out into the open world.

They walk for a while, saying nothing.

“This is real, isn’t it?” says Alan. “I mean… we made it. It all worked out, it doesn’t even make _sense_ and it worked out.”

“I know, right?” Nadia doesn’t need to check her watch; doesn’t need to glance at her phone. She can feel the time in her body, now, like it’s muscle memory. She knows they’re on the cusp of an hour they’ve never lived before.

“What do we do now?” says Alan. “I mean… Jesus, what do we do?”

“Dunno.” Nadia sighs, itching for another cigarette. “You remember what I said to you on the roof?”

Alan doesn’t answer her, and without looking she’s not sure if it’s because he _doesn’t_ remember, or he doesn’t want to say. It’s neither, in the end; he adjusts her arm on his and takes her hand again, because he does remember, and he doesn’t _need_ to say.

Nadia’s not much for holding hands, but it’s cold as shit tonight, and it’s nice, too. “C’mon, baby,” she says. “Let’s find out what happens on Tuesday.”


End file.
